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‘A Character to lose’: Richard Goodlad, the Rangpur dhing, and the priorities of the East India Company's early colonial administrators1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2014

JAMES LEES
JAMES LEES*
Affiliation:
Institute of Historical Research, London, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines the conduct of Richard Goodlad, the East India Company's collector in Rangpur, north Bengal, upon the outbreak of a peasant rebellion in his district during 1783. It uses his reaction to this event to illustrate the nature of the Company's district bureaucracy and its relationship with the central colonial authorities in Calcutta during the later eighteenth century.

The article considers the aims and limitations of the European officials who were sent out to administer Bengal's districts, detailing their priorities and practices within a weak and decentralised state structure. Ultimately it argues that the relationship between these local and central components of the colonial state was, prior to the Company's rise to subcontinental hegemony in the early nineteenth-century, profoundly shaped both by widespread military under-resourcing, and by the primacy of personal interest among its local officials.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 301 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Professor P. J. Marshall and Dr J. Wallis for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article, and to Mrs R. Dobson for suggesting references for Goodlad's life after India.

References

2 R. Goodlad to D. Anderson, Rangpur, 14 April 1784, British Library, Anderson Papers, xx, Add MS 45436, f. 49.

3 Ray, S., Transformations on the Bengal Frontier: Jalpaiguri, 1765–1948 (London, 2002), p. 37 Google Scholar.

4 Marshall, P. J., Bengal: The British Bridgehead: Eastern India 1740–1828 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 90 Google Scholar.

5 Ibid ., p. 151.

6 Marshall, P. J., “Hastings, Warren (1732–1818)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), xxv, p. 784 Google Scholar.

7 Yang, A. A., The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India, Saran District, 1793–1920 (Delhi, 1999), p. 226 Google Scholar.

8 Marshall, Bengal the British Bridgehead, p. 94.

9 Callahan, R., The East India Company and Army Reform, 1783–98 (Cambridge, 1972), p. 6 Google Scholar.

10 Peers, D. M., Between Mars and Mammon: Colonial Armies and the Garrison State in Early Nineteenth Century India, 1819–1835 (London, 1995), p. 11 Google Scholar.

11 See ‘Ninth Report of the Secret Committee of 1773’, Reports from Committees of the House of Commons, 12 vols. (1803–06), iv, pp. 506–507, and British Library, India Office Records, Bengal Military Annual Statements 1785–1820, L/MIL/8/1–29.

12 Commenting on the use of the army in securing the district revenues, a senior member of the governor-general's supreme council declared that its employment in these “provincial duties” was “pregnant with Evils of a most serious nature”, see Secret Department, Minute and Resolution of the Governor General in Council, 29 June 1795, BL, IOR, F/4/8/709.

13 Bryant, G. J., “Pacification in the Early British Raj”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XIV, i (Oct. 1985), p. 8 Google Scholar.

14 Bengal Military (incomplete) and Civil Statement, 1784–85, BL IOR L/MIL/8/1, pp. 75–78.

15 Alam, M. and Subrahmanyam, S. (eds.), The Mughal State, 1526–1750 (3rd edition, Delhi, 2003), p. 42 Google Scholar.

16 Under Cornwallis's reforms of 1786, district collectors were to receive an increased salary of 1,500 rupees per month. Misra, B. B., The Central Administration of the East India Company, 1773–1834 (Manchester, 1959), p. 157 Google Scholar.

17 Wellesley's minute, 10 July 1800, cit. ibid., p. 389.

18 “A Summary Abstract of Mr Hastings’ Government And Present Situation (1781)”, H. H. Dodwell (ed.), Warren Hastings’ Letters to Sir John Macpherson (London, 1927), p. 73.

19 Marshall, P. J., East Indian Fortunes: the British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1976), p. 218 Google Scholar.

20 E. G. Glazier, The District of Rungpore (1872), cit. Firminger, W. K. (ed.), Bengal District Records: Rangpur, i, 1770–1779, Letters sent and received (Calcutta, 1914), p. 1 Google Scholar.

21 Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p. 193.

22 Ibid ., p. 197.

23 R. Goodlad to G. Bogle, 24 September 1779, Mitchell Library, Bogle MSS, cit. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes, p. 198.

24 Wenger, R., “George Bogle, Part 3: Into Bhutan and Tibet”, The Journal of the Families in British India Society, XVI (Autumn 2006), p. 27 Google Scholar.

25 Wilson, J. E., “‘A Thousand Countries to go to’: Peasants and rulers in late eighteenth century Bengal”, Past & Present, CLXXXIX (Nov. 2005), p. 87 Google Scholar.

26 R. Goodlad to D. Anderson, Rangpur, 14 April 1784, British Library, Anderson Papers, xx, Add MS 45436, f. 47.

27 “Report of the Rungpore Commission”, 23 March 1786, cit. McLane, J. R., Land and local kingship in eighteenth-century Bengal (Cambridge, 1993), p. 84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ray, Transformations on the Bengal Frontier, p. 37.

29 Wilson, “‘Thousand Countries’”, p. 88.

30 Ibid ., p. 84.

31 Circular from Fort William, 3 Oct. 1781, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, ii, p. 160.

32 Boyce, D. G., “From Assaye to the Assaye: Reflections on British Government, Force, and Moral Authority in India”, Journal of Military History, LXIII, iii (July 1999), p. 651 Google Scholar.

33 R. Goodlad to Committee of Revenue, March 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iv, p. 151.

34 R. Goodlad to ‘The Ryots of the Chucklas of Cargeehaut, Kankneah and Tepah’, Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 138.

35 R. Goodlad to ‘The Ryots & ca of the Pergunnahs of, Kankneah, Cargeehaut & ca’, Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 142.

36 R. Goodlad to Committee of Revenue, March 1783, Ibid., p. 151.

37 W. Rooke to R. Goodlad, 15 Feb. 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iii, p. 13.

38 A. Macdonald to R. Goodlad, 22 Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 20

39 W. Haverkam to R. Goodlad, 20 Jan. 1783, Ibid., p. 7.

40 Ibid ., p. 7. Goodlad reported an establishment of 300 barqandazes (100 above his permitted complement) between May and July 1782. It seems probable that this remained the case at least until he was warned by the Committee of Revenue in January 1783, and, with the onset of the dhing, likely that it continued for some time after.

41 R. Goodlad to Committee of Revenue, [. . .] March 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iv, p. 151.

42 R. Goodlad to A. Macdonald, 13 Feb. 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iv, p. 133.

43 R. Goodlad to A. Macdonald, 13 Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 133.

44 A. Macdonald to R. Goodlad, 21 Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 135.

45 R. Goodlad to the Committee of Revenue [. . .] March 1783, Ibid., p. 152.

46 Ibid ., p. 151.

47 Committee of Revenue to R. Goodlad, 28 Feb. 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iii, p. 22.

48 Warren Hastings suggested that it was easily in Devi Singh's power “both to commit the enormities which are laid to his charge, and to conceal the grounds of them from Mr Goodlad”, see P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vi, India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786–1788 (Oxford, 1991), p. 434.

49 R. Goodlad to D. Anderson, 14 April 1784, Anderson Papers, xx, BL Add MS 45,436, ff. 47.

50 R. Goodlad to A. Macdonald, 13 Feb. 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iv, p. 133.

51 Ibid ., p. 133.

52 Committee of Revenue to R. Goodlad, 20 Feb. 1783, Firminger, BDR: Rangpur, iii, p. 16.

53 Committee of Revenue to R. Goodlad, 28 Feb. 1783, Ibid., p. 22.

54 During his prosecution of Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke declared that Richard Goodlad “had been a patient witness of all these cruelties, to say no more. . .”, see Marshall, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, vi, p. 422.

55 R. Goodlad to D. Anderson, 14 April 1784, Anderson Papers, xx, BL Add MS 45,436, ff. 46.

56 Ibid ., ff. 49.

57 Ibid ., ff. 48.

58 Ibid ., ff. 46.

59 Ibid ., ff. 48.

60 See ‘The Residence of Richard Goodlad at Baruipur’, Balthazar Solvyns (1793; oil on wood panel) in the collection of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkatta.

61 The Times (London, 5 July 1822: no. 6566).

62 The Royal Kalendar and Court and City Register for England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Colonies (London, 1819), p. 239.

63 ‘Opening of the Impeachment, 19 February 1788’, Marshall, Edmund Burke, vi, p. 434.

64 ‘I have a good opinion of Goodlad's sense, & I told him to have full confidence in talking with you. Get him to pass a Saturday & Sunday with you at Hooghly and make him be very free with you, which I desire him to be. I told him how trusty a man you were. The great point to my mind appears to be to get every able man. . .’ addendum, G. Bogle to D. Anderson, 11 Nov. 1780, Anderson Papers, v, BL Add MSS 45,421, f. 118.

65 Marshall, Edmund Burke, vi, p. 428.

66 Ibid ., p. 434.

67 See, for example, the conduct of the Company's collectors in Chittagong in the face of the Chakma uprising of the late 1770s and early 1780s, in Lees, J., “A ‘Tranquil Spectator’: the district official and the practice of local government in late eighteenth-century Bengal”, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, XXXVIII, i (March 2010), pp. 1–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.